Press Release: AST Takes King County Live on Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service in Record Implementation

AST has successfully completed its go-live of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) at King County, WA, paving the way for multifaceted Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) migrations. The project is the first of its kind in the Public Sector – a complex migration from an on-premise Oracle Public Sector Planning and Budgeting solution to the industry-leading Oracle PBCS. AST partnered with King County for an on-time and within-budget implementation.

The County deployed its on-premise Hyperion Planning solution more than five years ago and has since extended and refactored the solution multiple times in efforts focused on continuous improvement. The highly-customized solution performed poorly and had a long enhancement list from users – it had become difficult to manage, was not fully integrated, was severely out of date, and had gaps in reporting and automation that were high priority. The County relies heavily on its planning and budgeting solution and needed a quick and successful implementation.

AST proposed a targeted approach for a unique ‘lift and shift’ to the Cloud, accomplishing this task quickly to allow significant time for incorporating high-value enhancements. The migrated application was released to end users this summer, well ahead of the November, 2017 deadline.

“We often hear of IT projects that miss scope, schedule and/or budget, but tend to forget that well-managed projects with good teams can hit all their targets and be a recognized success,” said Jonathan Swift, Deputy Director of Budgets at King County. “This was a great collaborative effort between our partner AST and the County. Moving our Enterprise Budget System to the cloud had risks but our team worked through them and we have a solution in place that meets our strategic business needs. Well done!”